Vol. 5, No. 10 (Summer 2024)
Christin Wright-Taylor, Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University
Elizabeth Clarke, Learning Consultant, Transition and Learning Services, Wilfrid Laurier University
During the keynote for CWCA/ACCR’s 2022 conference, Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young (Dr. Vay) put out a call to Canadian writing centres to create a statement on translingual academic writing for students and faculty in their institutions. He also suggested creating a bank of translingual academic writing (TAW) to showcase the stylistic and rhetorical power of such writing, examples to light the way for students as well as faculty wanting to integrate diverse linguistic identities into academic writing.
Two years later, Laurier Writing Services has answered the call. We’ve created both a TAW statement and bank for our body of undergraduate and graduate students published on an public-facing website. Whether or not our statement and bank are specifically what Dr. Vay had in mind, it is our attempt to achieve his vision: a clarion call for institutions to allow translingual academic writing in coursework and a guide for students on what translingual academic writing could look like in their work.
The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind.
This article narrates the process by which we wrote the statement, gathered the TAW texts, and then adapted our content to fit the norms and conventions of “web writing” for a public-facing landing page.
The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind. Included in this article is the original TAW statement and sample bank created for the website, along with a link to the actual web page which is drastically revised to meet the conventions of web-writing and Laurier’s external communication norms.
The Audience and The Purpose
Since Laurier Writing Services is housed under Student Affairs, our statement and bank, first and foremost, needed to target students. As such, the statement would be housed on Writing Services’ website and positioned as a resource for student writing.
However, we know that faculty also access our student-facing resources to help support student writing. For example, faculty embed our online resources for syllabi assignments. They also access our student website to gain information on how to direct students to book appointments and attend workshops. For this reason, a secondary audience for our TAW bank was faculty. Within the institutional political structure, Writing Services’ focus is toward students. At the same time, the TAW statement and bank can provide faculty with fresh ideas for how they design and assess their writing assignments.
The primary purposes of the TAW statement and bank are to:
- Inform students that Writing Services not only believes in their linguistic and cultural identity but will help them integrate that identity into their writing in tangible ways.
- Direct students to book a writing appointment with Writing Services to receive guidance on how to integrate their linguistic identity into their academic writing.
- Show students examples of translingual academic writing to inspire their own writing.
The Process
The process of composing and curating the translingual academic writing bank began with Christin, the manager of Writing Services. She reached across the university for collaborators, inviting insight and input from campus partners who support the Indigenous student body, the Black and Racialized student body, and the faculty.
Key partners in the collaboration of this work were Zeeta Lazore Cayuga, Indigenous Academic Student Success, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank; Alesha Moffat, Educational Developer and Instructor in Faculty of Education, who generously contributed her collection of translingual academic writing samples to the bank; Linn Huemiller, Web Content Specialist, who helped us fit our content to web writing conventions and who also helped us understand the user trends for our webpage; Elizabeth Clarke, Academic Equity Programs, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank.
Elizabeth’s contribution was so substantial that she agreed to become a co-writer for the project.
The Starting Artifact
Here is the original TAW statement and bank written by Christin and Elizabeth.
Your Language. Your Writing. Your Voice.
Prepared by Christin Wright-Taylor and Elizabeth Clarke
“I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.”
~ Kamala Das, from “An Introduction”
Writing Services believes students have a right to use their own language and voice in academic writing. The staff are committed to developing writing strategies that not only consider the conventions of academic writing but also challenge and dismantle systemic barriers that students may face.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Conference on College Composition and Communication released a statement called, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (CCCC, 1974). This statement says students have the right to “Dig And Be Dug,” as Langston Hughes’s (2024) puts it. In other words, students have the right to bring their culture and language to academic writing and for that writing to be understood.
Writing Services acknowledges that academic writing has historically been Eurocentric, classed, and gendered, and that this has shut out students with diverse backgrounds. As Geneva Smitherman (1995) writes, “the Unhip among researchers, scholars, and intellectuals … [argued] that even though the [language] difference of those oppressed by race, class, or gender were cognitively equal to those of the mainstream, they were socially unequal” (p. 21). In other words, racialized English has been stereotyped as “ghetto.” International English is called, “broken.” And working-class English has been branded, “unintelligent.” But these various forms of language and dialects are just as intelligent and capable as mainstream language, and many scholars have shown us the way:
Suresh Canagarajah (2015) says that “rather than developing mastery in a single ‘target language,’ students should strive for competences in a repertoire of codes and discourses” (p. 284). Paul Kei Matsuda (2006) says that “all [writing] teachers need to reimagine the [writing] classroom as the multilingual space that it is” (649). And Ilona Leki and Joan Carson (1997) say that “experiencing a deep interaction between language, personal interests, needs, and backgrounds” is important for students in terms of linguistic and intellectual growth (p. 64).
This may sound lovely, but institutions and faculty may not know about Smitherman, Canagarajah, Matsuda, Leki and the many bright ideas about language diversity in academic writing. As a result, institutions are behind in including diverse languages and voices, which hinders student expression and intellectual growth (Horner & Trimbur, 2022; Matsuda, 2006; Shor, 1997).
What should students do then? First, read the excerpts of writing below that demonstrate all the different ways other scholars and writers have brought their culture and language into academic writing. Second, book an appointment with Writing Services to learn how you can balance meeting the expectations of your writing assignment with integrating your language and culture into your academic voice.
*Special thanks to Alesha Moffat, Teaching, Excellence, and Innovation for contributing key samples of translingual writing.
References
Canagarajah, S. (2015). The Place of World Englishes in Composition. In S. Perryman-Clark, D. E. Kirkland, A. Jackson, & G. Smitherman (Eds.), Students’ right to their own language: A critical sourcebook (pp. 284–285). Bedford / St Martin’s.
CCCC. (1974). Committee on CCC Language: Background Statement. College Composition and Communication, 25(3), 1–18.
Horner, B., & Trimbur, J. (2022). English Only and U.S. College Composition. CCC, 53(4), 594–630.
Hughes, L. (2024). Motto. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/150987/motto
Leki, I., & Carson, J. (1997). “Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing Experiences of ESL Students in University Courses. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587974
Matsuda, P. K. (2006). The myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. college composition. College English, 68(6), 637–651.
Shor, I. (1997). Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality. Journal of Basic Writing, 16(1), 91–104.
Smitherman, G. (1995). “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Retrospective. The English Journal, 84(1), 21–27.
The Final Artifact
Here is the final product: a web page created as an external facing artifact for students and faculty. Translingual Writing: Your Language. Your Writing. Your Voice | Students – Wilfrid Laurier University (wlu.ca)
The Translation
As you can see, there is quite a difference in style and format from the original statement to the web page. Though we spent hours laboring over the original statement, and were quite pleased with its stylistic savvy, Linn, our web designer, shared that the statement read too much like an “essay” and didn’t support optimal SEO algorithms. She also helped us understand the rhetorical context of the web page, which needed to function as a “wayfinding” tool, something that students can reference for where and how to access our resources. Finally, Linn helped us frame the content to best fit the way that students interact with the website: by Googling key search terms, then skimming the web page for the information they want.
To that end, we added two sections to the web page as practical support for students: “Book an Appointment” and “Talk to Your Instructor.” The booking section directs students to book an appointment with our writing consultants to help them negotiate using their own language and culture in their academic voice. The “Talk to Your Instructor” section offers students a template e-mail they can use to broach a conversation with their professor about possibly taking a translingual approach to their assignment.
Finally, copyright and accessibility considerations informed the design of the TAW bank. We had initially imagined the bank to be interactive with the writing samples appearing as tiles students could click on and navigate out to writing samples. However, in order to make the samples accessible and to avoid infringing on the original texts’ copyrights , we chose to offer the writing samples as links to publication pages where students can read the translingual pieces in full.
Reflecting on the Process
After completing the translingual statement and bank, here are Christin and Elizabeth’s reflections on the process:
Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process.
From Christin
Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process. It was vital to get Elizabeth, Zeeta, Alesha, and Linn’s input on the translingual academic writing bank. Their voices and perspectives contributed something significant to the process and ultimately made the translingual statement and bank better than it would have been otherwise.
Also, creating this statement and bank was a series of compromises: formatting it as a landing page sacrificed stylistic choices, as well as authorship (i.e. our names aren’t on the statement anymore). The landing page format also minimized the research and scholarship behind the statement and bank. On the other hand, by placing the statement and bank on the student-facing webpage, we gained accessibility to the students, relevance to their searches, and a visibility that wouldn’t otherwise be possible through internal institutional platforms.
From Elizabeth
As a learning consultant who is a part of Academic Equity Programs and working within a predominantly white institution (PWI), it’s important to me to collaborate with other staff, faculty and community partners to support the enrichment of the work being done for students (the collective).
Christin reached out to me and asked if I could provide feedback on a one-page statement about supporting and empowering diverse students to write using their unique linguistic identity and how the statement read for me as a Black woman working within a university setting. I initially read the statement from several perspectives as a Black woman working within a university, working with different individuals and groups, and recognizing it would read differently to different people. I collaborated with another colleague, Shevaungh Thomas, Racialized Counsellor, and asked how it read for her. There, we discussed the intent, meaning and initial thoughts of the article and provided feedback for more clarity.
While sharing the feedback with Christin, the process turned into a collaborative piece of work, allowing us to bounce ideas and thoughts off one another to try to speak to different readers and invite them into the writing process. It was a neat collaboration for me, as I don’t necessarily always see myself as a writer, but further highlighted the importance of creating space for collaboration and diversity in writing centres in Canada, echoing Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young.
Will It Work?
It is uncertain if the TAW statement and bank in this format will achieve Dr. Vay’s vision and our purpose. Will the students find this web page? Will it help them start conversations with their faculty and direct them to our resources? All of this is untested yet. However, another advantage to choosing to house this resource on a public-facing website, is that we will have access to analytics that can show us how many internal and external users access the site, how long users stay on the site, and how far down they scroll through the site. Our team will review these analytics periodically to see how and when users are engaging the translingual academic writing bank. In the end, this bank — in this format — may be a shot in the dark, but at least it’s a shot.
Clare Goulet is writing centre coordinator and adjunct professor in the Department of English at Mount St. Vincent University, teaching editing, composition, and intro creative writing
